Movie reviews: A Most Wanted Man, Pride, The Boxtrolls
opens by telling us that Hamburg was the city where the 9/11 attackers planned their atrocity, then introduces us to Gunther Bachmann (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a German spy charged with infiltrating the city’s Islamic community to develop intelligence sources. When the half-Chechen, half-Russian Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) arrives in Hamburg, requesting that human rights lawyer, Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams), put him in touch with banker, Tommy Brue (Willem Dafoe), Bachmann spots an opportunity to ensnare the ostensibly respectable Muslim leader — but suspected terrorist enabler — Faisal Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi). As the pawns shuffle around the board, however, various intelligence agencies jostle for position and the right to make the killer move. Adapted from John le Carré’s novel and directed by Anton Corbijn, A Most Wanted Man is a superb addition to the canon of spy thrillers, le Carré’s bracingly cynical tale of post-9/11 realpolitik benefiting hugely from Corbijn’s photographer’s eye, its clean, spare lines and neon-lit palette a sharp contrast to the chiaroscuro and murky shadows of the classic Cold War film. Hoffman, who died earlier this year, is in phenomenal form as a kind of disillusioned George Smiley, so compelling he threatens to unbalance the film — the eye is riveted to his bear-like, but emotionally raw and fragile, character as he appears to channel a bedraggled Richard Burton (Burton, of course, starred in the 1965 adaptation of le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold). The movie plays with the structure of the novel, but Corbijn, and screenwriter, Andrew Bovell, are faithful to the tone and themes, with the result that A Most Wanted Man is an absorbing spy thriller with an Oscar-worthy performance at its heart.
